IN REVIEW
A Review of Bob Haverluck’s
When God Was Flesh and Wild: Stories in Defense of the Earth
reviewed by Stephen Willey
A Review of Bob Haverluck’s
When God Was Flesh and Wild: Stories in Defense of the Earth
reviewed by Stephen Willey
Stephen Willey is a retired minister of The United Church of Canada now living in Bracebridge, Ontario. After serving congregations across western and central Canada, he offered leadership in the areas of intercultural ministry, and theological education for the General Council of The United Church of Canada.
Thirty years ago, I had the pleasure of driving with Bob Haverluck through a suburban neighbourhood of Selkirk, Manitoba. "Look at all the beautiful front lawns!" I enthused. "Yeah," he quipped. "Frightening, isn’t it?" It was an unexpected and delightfully mischievous answer. I also found it somewhat puzzling at the time. In the intervening years, I have slowly put together the pieces of that puzzle. Admiring a flawless, rigidly defined lawn says something about one’s aesthetics. Being willing to devote one’s time and labor, chemical fertilizer, and the earth’s water to maintain a lawn says something about the relationship between one’s aesthetic and one’s ethics. Finding something as seemingly mundane as a manicured lawn amenable to one’s view of the world says something about one’s understanding of God’s intention for creation and our own vocation as participants in shaping the ecological future of the planet. As a symbol of control, purity, and separation, the rigidly bounded, weed-free lawn says a lot—and little of it is good news for the earth.
The four chapters of When God Was Flesh and Wild: Stories in Defense of the Earth employ a highly imaginative alternative aesthetic, and interpretive framework, to present a solid theology and ethic of earth-care. It also includes a postscript that functions superbly as a learning guide for groups large and small. Each chapter is an imaginative retelling of a familiar biblical story with accompanying drawings by the author: the story of Nebuchadnezzar from the book of Daniel ("The King of Bigger and More"); Jesus in the wilderness following his baptism ("The God of Flesh and Wild"); Jesus in Jerusalem in the days prior to his crucifixion ("Little Sparrows See God Fall"); and the revelation to John of Patmos ("Jailbird John and the Choirs of the Creatures").
Haverluck’s art will not appeal to everyone, and the amount of poetic license he takes in recasting beloved biblical stories will be too unorthodox for some readers. Those who stay engaged with this book, however, will be rewarded. It is a relatively small volume, yet it runs deep in its capacity to inform, delight, and expand one’s eco-imagination. Haverluck’s re-imaginings are what Ched Myers calls, in his excellent foreword to the book, "midrashic adventures." As unconventional as these re-presentations are, however, Myers points out that they are nevertheless "anchored by a careful literacy in canonical Scripture and a deep conviction of its premodern, countercultural wisdom" (xiii).
This book’s vision could hardly be more different than that symbolized by a rabidly constrained, and botanically sanitized, modern suburban landscape. Even Haverluck’s drawings are rarely defined by a limiting frame. Like the proverbial cup overflowing, images spill out and over their picture’s edges. Metaphorically, and literally, Haverluck’s stories and drawings put weeds in our gardens of Eden, otters and frogs in our tears, nests in our coiffures, beaks in our mouths, feathers up our noses, and bees up our wazoos. Tree leaves pour out of our ears, and songbirds perch on our lower lips. This is farce. This is whimsy. This is a sometimes playful take on the seriously lamentable ecological degradation of the planet. This is tragi-comedy for citizens of the Anthropocene.
"A place for everything, and everything in its place" is a rule that Haverluck violates with gleeful abandon. In his mischievousness, he does not just bring the human and nonhuman into close proximity, but goes a step further and inserts the non-human into the human. He delights in putting things where they clearly don’t belong. Mary Douglas pointed to the significance of such disordering in her book, Purity and Danger. Through her anthropological studies, she observed that an object is not out of place because it is inherently dirty; rather, a culture labels it as "dirty" because it is out of place. Dirt is an offense against an established order. It also exists in the eye of the beholder. To question our way of seeing who are the dirty and who are the clean is, therefore, an unavoidably political act. For religious communities, it is also an inherently theological endeavor.
In the topsy-turvy world of When God Was Flesh and Wild, the western ordering of the relationship between humankind and the creatures representing nature is messed-up and turned on its head. This perspective clearly belongs to the lineage of Jesus of Nazareth, who preached a prophetic message of the presence and the promise of the Kin(g)dom of God. He taught that the first shall be last and the last first, the poor shall be blessed, and the rich shall be sent away empty. As the gospels attest, in enacting the good news of God’s all-embracing love, Jesus violated any number of cultural and religious boundaries and proscriptions. In the canonical gospels this man, about whom many asked with a derisive sneer, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" scandalized the prim and the powerful by befriending outcasts and sinners.
In the two middle stories of When God Was Flesh and Wild, Haverluck explicitly extends Jesus’ solidarity to include the non-human. Jesus weeps with the creatures before the walls of Jerusalem, he cavorts with them in the company of children, the sparrows mourn to see him fall on Golgotha, and a noisy menagerie of his feathered and four-legged friends trumpet and dance the good news of Easter’s dawning.
Haverluck the artist plays on Emmanuel Levinas’s insight that when we "face" the Other, they become alive to us as real subjects in a shared communion of being. Faces are foregrounded in his drawings: bears, turtles, mourning doves, wolves, rabbits, ducks and, of course, human beings in whom God is also both hiding and found. Haverluck’s style of sometimes drawing with blurred boundaries between the figures in his pictures evokes the question, "In the measuring of the earth’s well-being, where do the animal bodies end and the human bodies begin?" And when Jesus appears as one such figure, the question arises: "Where does God’s body end, and the bodies of the animals and the earth begin?" Exactly.
In Haverluck’s world, all creatures possess real agency. They are not mere wallpaper on the theatric set of the human drama. They dance, laugh, weep and get angry. They prophesy, instruct, kiss, and heal. Most crucially, in a continuation of the legacy of pre-Christian Judaic midrash, and the ancient Sufi tale, The Animals Lawsuit Against Humanity, Haverluck’s creatures also hold humanity to account for the harm it does to them and to their habitations. Haverluck helps us not only truly to see, as if for the first time "all creatures stinky and ugly and bright and beautiful," but to "behold" them as "all my relations," a phrase originating among North America’s Indigenous peoples (xv). Therefore, as Haverluck states in his Introduction, "[W]e are ‘beholden’ to what’s beheld. Obligations come with the seeing. In this ‘optics of the heart’, what we are held by and ‘faced’ with becomes a matter of ethics no less than perception" (xvi).
The animals ensure that King Nebuchadnezzar understands this in the first midrashic adventure in the collection. Drawing from the book of Daniel, "The King of Bigger and More" recounts Nebuchadnezzar’s voraciousness, and how the animals seek to convert him from being an enemy to being an ally. Eventually the king weeps tears of remorse, yet the powerful Nebuchadnezzar still cannot avoid Daniel’s pointed question: "So decide, will you continue to be good news to the greedy and bad news to the needy, or the other way around?" (5). And, of course, the reader cannot avoid this question either.
The three other stories are just as whimsically hard-hitting and theologically insightful. In "The God of Flesh and Wild," Jesus is sorely tempted in the wilderness by a man in a blue suit. He chooses, instead, to heed the voices of the creatures and to become a piper of the earth’s songs of lament and joy. When the animals decide that he is ready, they ordain Jesus "Lord of the Dance," and send him forth.
"Little Sparrows See God Fall" reimagines Jesus’ final days among the humans. In those days, Jesus "said with his body what could only weakly be said with words" (46). He plays and laughs with the children, encouraging any and all to "Play among what is, and unhide the good that is hidden in plain sight and the good that is yet to be" (48). In what might be a foreshadowing of his being "lifted up" on a cross, and rising in resurrection, Jesus volunteers to go first in the blanket toss: "Up, up he was tossed into the heavens and falling back down onto the earth-colored catching blanket" (48).
A donkey hilariously narrates the final story, "Jailbird John and the Choirs of the Creatures." His answer to what binds him and John together on Patmos? "[W]e share a belief, a belief that the earth belongs to the Creator, who played hide-and-seek in the Christly Jesus" (67). Donkey is the first to hear the details of John’s heavenly vision that includes a rainbow crowning the throne, proclaiming a peace treaty with all the earth. Occupying honored places nearest the throne of God are a lion, a wild ox, an animal with the face of a person, and an eagle. Christ the wounded lamb comes "eastering forth," and when the animals begin their chorus "all the kindom of God was up on tiptoe singing with ‘them’" (76).
In the end, When God Was Flesh and Wild invites us to abandon our lawnmowers on the sidewalk, just as the first disciples left their nets on the shore, to join the chorus of the creatures and follow the Lord of the Dance into God’s peaceable creation.
Thirty years ago, I had the pleasure of driving with Bob Haverluck through a suburban neighbourhood of Selkirk, Manitoba. "Look at all the beautiful front lawns!" I enthused. "Yeah," he quipped. "Frightening, isn’t it?" It was an unexpected and delightfully mischievous answer. I also found it somewhat puzzling at the time. In the intervening years, I have slowly put together the pieces of that puzzle. Admiring a flawless, rigidly defined lawn says something about one’s aesthetics. Being willing to devote one’s time and labor, chemical fertilizer, and the earth’s water to maintain a lawn says something about the relationship between one’s aesthetic and one’s ethics. Finding something as seemingly mundane as a manicured lawn amenable to one’s view of the world says something about one’s understanding of God’s intention for creation and our own vocation as participants in shaping the ecological future of the planet. As a symbol of control, purity, and separation, the rigidly bounded, weed-free lawn says a lot—and little of it is good news for the earth.
The four chapters of When God Was Flesh and Wild: Stories in Defense of the Earth employ a highly imaginative alternative aesthetic, and interpretive framework, to present a solid theology and ethic of earth-care. It also includes a postscript that functions superbly as a learning guide for groups large and small. Each chapter is an imaginative retelling of a familiar biblical story with accompanying drawings by the author: the story of Nebuchadnezzar from the book of Daniel ("The King of Bigger and More"); Jesus in the wilderness following his baptism ("The God of Flesh and Wild"); Jesus in Jerusalem in the days prior to his crucifixion ("Little Sparrows See God Fall"); and the revelation to John of Patmos ("Jailbird John and the Choirs of the Creatures").
Haverluck’s art will not appeal to everyone, and the amount of poetic license he takes in recasting beloved biblical stories will be too unorthodox for some readers. Those who stay engaged with this book, however, will be rewarded. It is a relatively small volume, yet it runs deep in its capacity to inform, delight, and expand one’s eco-imagination. Haverluck’s re-imaginings are what Ched Myers calls, in his excellent foreword to the book, "midrashic adventures." As unconventional as these re-presentations are, however, Myers points out that they are nevertheless "anchored by a careful literacy in canonical Scripture and a deep conviction of its premodern, countercultural wisdom" (xiii).
This book’s vision could hardly be more different than that symbolized by a rabidly constrained, and botanically sanitized, modern suburban landscape. Even Haverluck’s drawings are rarely defined by a limiting frame. Like the proverbial cup overflowing, images spill out and over their picture’s edges. Metaphorically, and literally, Haverluck’s stories and drawings put weeds in our gardens of Eden, otters and frogs in our tears, nests in our coiffures, beaks in our mouths, feathers up our noses, and bees up our wazoos. Tree leaves pour out of our ears, and songbirds perch on our lower lips. This is farce. This is whimsy. This is a sometimes playful take on the seriously lamentable ecological degradation of the planet. This is tragi-comedy for citizens of the Anthropocene.
"A place for everything, and everything in its place" is a rule that Haverluck violates with gleeful abandon. In his mischievousness, he does not just bring the human and nonhuman into close proximity, but goes a step further and inserts the non-human into the human. He delights in putting things where they clearly don’t belong. Mary Douglas pointed to the significance of such disordering in her book, Purity and Danger. Through her anthropological studies, she observed that an object is not out of place because it is inherently dirty; rather, a culture labels it as "dirty" because it is out of place. Dirt is an offense against an established order. It also exists in the eye of the beholder. To question our way of seeing who are the dirty and who are the clean is, therefore, an unavoidably political act. For religious communities, it is also an inherently theological endeavor.
In the topsy-turvy world of When God Was Flesh and Wild, the western ordering of the relationship between humankind and the creatures representing nature is messed-up and turned on its head. This perspective clearly belongs to the lineage of Jesus of Nazareth, who preached a prophetic message of the presence and the promise of the Kin(g)dom of God. He taught that the first shall be last and the last first, the poor shall be blessed, and the rich shall be sent away empty. As the gospels attest, in enacting the good news of God’s all-embracing love, Jesus violated any number of cultural and religious boundaries and proscriptions. In the canonical gospels this man, about whom many asked with a derisive sneer, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" scandalized the prim and the powerful by befriending outcasts and sinners.
In the two middle stories of When God Was Flesh and Wild, Haverluck explicitly extends Jesus’ solidarity to include the non-human. Jesus weeps with the creatures before the walls of Jerusalem, he cavorts with them in the company of children, the sparrows mourn to see him fall on Golgotha, and a noisy menagerie of his feathered and four-legged friends trumpet and dance the good news of Easter’s dawning.
Haverluck the artist plays on Emmanuel Levinas’s insight that when we "face" the Other, they become alive to us as real subjects in a shared communion of being. Faces are foregrounded in his drawings: bears, turtles, mourning doves, wolves, rabbits, ducks and, of course, human beings in whom God is also both hiding and found. Haverluck’s style of sometimes drawing with blurred boundaries between the figures in his pictures evokes the question, "In the measuring of the earth’s well-being, where do the animal bodies end and the human bodies begin?" And when Jesus appears as one such figure, the question arises: "Where does God’s body end, and the bodies of the animals and the earth begin?" Exactly.
In Haverluck’s world, all creatures possess real agency. They are not mere wallpaper on the theatric set of the human drama. They dance, laugh, weep and get angry. They prophesy, instruct, kiss, and heal. Most crucially, in a continuation of the legacy of pre-Christian Judaic midrash, and the ancient Sufi tale, The Animals Lawsuit Against Humanity, Haverluck’s creatures also hold humanity to account for the harm it does to them and to their habitations. Haverluck helps us not only truly to see, as if for the first time "all creatures stinky and ugly and bright and beautiful," but to "behold" them as "all my relations," a phrase originating among North America’s Indigenous peoples (xv). Therefore, as Haverluck states in his Introduction, "[W]e are ‘beholden’ to what’s beheld. Obligations come with the seeing. In this ‘optics of the heart’, what we are held by and ‘faced’ with becomes a matter of ethics no less than perception" (xvi).
The animals ensure that King Nebuchadnezzar understands this in the first midrashic adventure in the collection. Drawing from the book of Daniel, "The King of Bigger and More" recounts Nebuchadnezzar’s voraciousness, and how the animals seek to convert him from being an enemy to being an ally. Eventually the king weeps tears of remorse, yet the powerful Nebuchadnezzar still cannot avoid Daniel’s pointed question: "So decide, will you continue to be good news to the greedy and bad news to the needy, or the other way around?" (5). And, of course, the reader cannot avoid this question either.
The three other stories are just as whimsically hard-hitting and theologically insightful. In "The God of Flesh and Wild," Jesus is sorely tempted in the wilderness by a man in a blue suit. He chooses, instead, to heed the voices of the creatures and to become a piper of the earth’s songs of lament and joy. When the animals decide that he is ready, they ordain Jesus "Lord of the Dance," and send him forth.
"Little Sparrows See God Fall" reimagines Jesus’ final days among the humans. In those days, Jesus "said with his body what could only weakly be said with words" (46). He plays and laughs with the children, encouraging any and all to "Play among what is, and unhide the good that is hidden in plain sight and the good that is yet to be" (48). In what might be a foreshadowing of his being "lifted up" on a cross, and rising in resurrection, Jesus volunteers to go first in the blanket toss: "Up, up he was tossed into the heavens and falling back down onto the earth-colored catching blanket" (48).
A donkey hilariously narrates the final story, "Jailbird John and the Choirs of the Creatures." His answer to what binds him and John together on Patmos? "[W]e share a belief, a belief that the earth belongs to the Creator, who played hide-and-seek in the Christly Jesus" (67). Donkey is the first to hear the details of John’s heavenly vision that includes a rainbow crowning the throne, proclaiming a peace treaty with all the earth. Occupying honored places nearest the throne of God are a lion, a wild ox, an animal with the face of a person, and an eagle. Christ the wounded lamb comes "eastering forth," and when the animals begin their chorus "all the kindom of God was up on tiptoe singing with ‘them’" (76).
In the end, When God Was Flesh and Wild invites us to abandon our lawnmowers on the sidewalk, just as the first disciples left their nets on the shore, to join the chorus of the creatures and follow the Lord of the Dance into God’s peaceable creation.